Some Lines of Poetry
From the Notebooks of bpNichol
- Publisher
- Coach House Books
- Initial publish date
- Sep 2024
- Category
- Canadian, Literary, Limericks & Verse
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781552454909
- Publish Date
- Sep 2024
- List Price
- $24.95
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781770568297
- Publish Date
- Sep 2024
- List Price
- $17.95
Add it to your shelf
Where to buy it
Description
For bpNichol’s 80th birthday, a selection of 80 pieces from his 1980s notebooks, an astounding trove of never-before-seen work.
One of Canada’s most beloved poets, bpNichol (1944–1988), left a huge legacy of poetry, prose, scripts, comics, and playful interrogation of language after his untimely passing in 1988. In celebration of what would have been Nichol’s eightieth birthday, Some Lines of Poetry gathers excerpts from Nichol’s journals across the 1980s to give a unique perspective on craft, process, and a writer’s life. Featuring works in progress, insight into Nichol’s thinking, previously unpublished prose and lyric, visual, and sound poems, Some Lines of Poetry documents Nichol’s “apprenticeship to language” and his playful daily exploration of the limits of writing.
Lovingly edited by noted poet-scholars Derek Beaulieu and Gregory Betts, who provide an afterword contextualizing Nichol’s practice, Some Lines of Poetry is a map of hidden corners, a guidebook to poetic play, and a tribute to Nichol’s ongoing influence.
"No other writer of our time and place was so diverse, attempted so much, and never lost sight of his intent." – Michael Ondaatje
About the authors
derek beaulieu is the author of five books of poetry, three volumes of conceptual fiction, and over 150 chapbooks. His critical edition (co-edited with Gregory Betts) of bill bissett’s RUSH: what fuckan theory will be published in 2012. beaulieu teaches at the University of Calgary, the Alberta College of Art, and Mount Royal University.
Lori Emerson is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She writes about and teaches electronic literature (especially digital poetry), experimental American and Canadian poetry, the history of computing, and media theory. She is co-editor, with Darren Wershler, of The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol Reader (2007).
John Riddell is the author of Criss-Cross (Coach House, 1977) and numerous other volumes of visual poetry and prose. An early editor of grOnk, Ganglia, and Phenomenon Press, his work has been included in magazines like Kontakte, Descant, and Ganglia from the 1960s to the present.
GREGORY BETTS is a poet, editor, essayist and teacher, originally from Vancouver and Toronto. Since his first published poem, an anagrammatical translation of a short poem by bpNichol, Betts's work has consistently troubled individual authorship through such mechanisms as anagrams, collaboration, found-texts and response-text writing. If Language presents paragraph-length anagrams that explore the formation of meaning within a recombinant linguistic system. Haikube was part of a collaborative art project with sculptors Matt Donovan and Hallie Siegel in which six of Betts's poems were carved into an ebony movable (a la Rubiks) cube. The text was carved in negative relief, which allowed the cube to function as a press block to print new poems as they were 'discovered' by moving the sides of the cube. Betts currently lives in St. Catharines, where he edits PRECIPICe magazine, curates the Grey Borders Reading Series and teaches Avant-Garde and Canadian Literature at Brock University.
Other titles by
Surface Tension
Nights on Prose Mountain
Please, No More Poetry
The Poetry of derek beaulieu
Writing Surfaces
Selected Fiction of John Riddell
RUSH
what fukan theory; a study uv language
The Captain Poetry Poems
How to Write
fractal economies
Shift & Switch
New Canadian Poetry
frogments from the frag pool
haiku after Basho
Other titles by
Future Horizons
Canadian Digital Humanities
Finding Nothing
The VanGardes, 1959-1975
They Have Bodies
They Have Bodies, by Barney Allen
A Critical Edition
Avant Canada
Poets, Prophets, Revolutionaries
Space Between Her Lips
The Poetry of Margaret Christakos
Counterblasting Canada
Marshall McLuhan, Wyndham Lewis, Wilfred Watson, and Sheila Watson
This is Importance
A Students' Guide to literature
Avant-Garde Canadian Literature
The Early Manifestations
RUSH
what fukan theory; a study uv language